Building and maintaining a business is no easy feat, which is why we developed our #ChaseSmallBiz series focused on passing the megaphone to entrepreneurs to share their advice and stories. In developing this series, we’ve pushed to spotlight diverse-owned businesses across the country to span a variety of industries and cities.
Although we bank these small businesses, we remove ourselves from the story and focus solely on their journey. We are using our platform to give entrepreneurs a voice and share learnings that can help and inspire.
We know that when small businesses thrive, the local economy thrives as well, which is why we’ve started telling these growth and success stories. This year, we’ve heard from and celebrated:
With the goal of driving awareness, we used native tags, linked out to each business landing page and used the Collab feature on Instagram to give our audience (over 4.2M followers on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn) access to these brands.
This content series came to life through creative brainstorming and strategy workshops focused on how to tell our story of local impact during cultural moments with a human-first approach. We tapped our internal diversity, equity, and inclusion communications team and our Business Banking marketing partners to help identify the best businesses to spotlight and the right messaging to share widely through internal and external communications.
For messaging, we were able to identify an approach that would resonate best with our audience. We settled on an idea which removed our brand from the story and gave the entrepreneurs the platform to share their own journey, learnings and insights. This is an ongoing series that has seen success for the past five years.
For sourcing the stories, we worked with our Business Banking marketing partner. We narrowed down our choices based on cultural moment, industry and location. For the first half of 2024, we were able to showcase a range of businesses to include:
Outside of spanning different locations and industries, each of these entrepreneurs has a unique journey and recipe for success. They are everyday customers of Chase who deal with real problems, and they are our best source of connecting to customers, clients and employees in a relatable way.
For content creation, we start preparations for each cultural moment at least two months in advance. We typically receive a list of three to five businesses that fit the qualifications and narrow down choices based on the story and diversity of location and industry. From there, we hold a prep call to hear from the CEO/Founder and talk through logistics. Since this is an ongoing series, we have pre-approved budget for the year. We often have to navigate the busy schedules of the entrepreneurs and the normal day-to-day foot traffic of customers when filming in their space. Once content capture is completed, our editors can create each video, share for review and approval and post during their respective moment.
For the visual creative, our goal was to catch the attention of our audience quickly and maintain their interest with a great story and moments of insight. This series is filmed through a fast-paced, documentary-style video. The beginning hook can look different for each business. We’ve used match cuts, zooms, time-lapse and slow-motion to catch the audience at the start of a video. Use of B-roll with the entrepreneur and their team, hero shots of the product/service and natural soundbites help the audience transport into these spaces. We use dynamic, slow-motion hero shots of the CEOs/founders to spotlight them as the focal point and give them a moment and space to feel celebrated and honored for all that they’ve accomplished.
For content amplification, we leveraged Chase Facebook and Instagram and Chase for Business LinkedIn. We used a mix of different ratio video formats to meet channel best practices (9x16 and 4x5). On Instagram, we took advantage of the Collab feature to engage both our audience and the business’s audience simultaneously. We also used a variety of native Instagram Story tools to engage our audience while educating them on the business. On Facebook, we utilized Reels instead of the video in-feed to reach a larger audience. On LinkedIn, we chose to utilize the Chase for Business page to reach a more niche audience who would benefit directly from the storytelling. Across all platforms, we tagged each business and linked out to their landing pages to drive overall awareness to their brand.
The #ChaseSmallBiz series continues to perform well across all platforms, resonates with our audience and helps tell our story of making dreams possible for everyone, everywhere, every day.
Through a multi-channel strategy approach, we leveraged Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, representing our audiences (over 4.2M total followers) to optimize our reach. We also worked with internal partners to leverage the content across newsletters, the company news page and the diversity, equity, and inclusion news page.
In celebration of Lunar New Year, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Juneteenth and Pride, we believe these videos provided a space for diverse entrepreneurs to share their journey and inspire others.
